The growing discontent behind Nintendo’s fun facade
ign.comI suppose this is run-of-the-mill for the video game industry, but man, it's sounds so hellish; people deserve not be humiliated like this at work.
Isn't the solution unions, akin to the heavily unionized movie / TV business? Short of that, Nintendo deserves some bad PR for this at least; as long as people keep leaking their crappy workplace conditions to the press, the execs will have to keep reading these articles, and maybe be they'll be incentivized to make things slightly better.
Definitely unions are becoming more and more popular again for a reason!
> Isn't the solution unions, akin to the heavily unionized movie / TV business?
So that might help, but some of NOA's current problem seems to be some mental baggage from their management about growing headcount after the struggles of the 3DS/Wii U era.
A normal company would have done layoffs. Nintendo doesn't do that, even without unions. But management who survived that era turned it into a culture of not taking on the seemingly existential risk of increasing permanent headcount in case there would be a future income crisis.
I'm not sure if unions would be more likely to help relieve that mental baggage, or help to force management to finally decide to work through it and figure out a way to manage for a stable workforce rather than this perm/temp duopoly that they have going on now.
It's gotten slightly better for developers, but the video game industry is horrible for most of the people in it. It's tends to be toxic with lower pay & benefits with much longer hours. I guess that's the price for doing something that you love.
imo The only time it works "well" is with successful indie companies.
Developers sit in a place of privilege at video game companies (I say as a former developer at a video game company) but the experience still sucks - there are far too many star-eyed fresh college graduates willing to work for peanuts for anyone to make a decent living working sane hours.
Indie companies are the absolute worst - there are occasional success stories (like, say, No Man's Sky) but they always involve insane overtime and fiscal risk - Sean Murray sold his house to keep the company afloat. And No Man's Sky - even with all the controversy - is one of the biggest recent successes (with the last one to go as mainstream being Minecraft IMO). If you make those fiscal and health gambles and lose then you're SOL - there are thousands of games made by passionate people that could have been good that just never hit the right PR vein or happened to have a buggy v1.0 and got written off by the community.
This is why I think the parallel to the movie industry is so useful: there, you also have actors/production staff/etc willing to work for essentially nothing, and an industry that, without the unions, would be more than happy to exploit them. It's not perfect, but the unions in Hollywood definitely prevent the studios from completely abusing the "doing something that you love" impulse.
The market is fundamentally unfair: Indie developers are forced to pay 30% commissions, whilst mega-studios get sweetheart deals of 10%.
These sweetheart deals are practically impossible for Indies (including ex-AAA workers) to compete against and replicate, and its leading to industry stagnation.
As long as the standard rate at Apple, Google, Valve, Microsoft, Sony remains 30%, I would not advise anyone to work in the games industry. At least Nintendo gives customers 5% cashback on Switch, leaving an effective commission rate of 25% (a major reason why that platform has been so successful and an oasis of success for Indie devs).
The first thing a GameDev Union should fight for is fair commission on these platforms, independent of entity size.
In many cases, successful indie companies aren't much better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDPzZkx0cPs
The solution is go find another job. Everbody, but everybody, is hiring.
You're right in some sense, I mean, software engineering is a skill that lots of companies outside of the video game industry will pay quite well for.
Still, it seems like there is a large oversupply of people who really want to work specifically on video games, and I think they deserve better working conditions than this, right? In an ideal world, there wouldn't be this Faustian bargain of "You can work on what you love, or you can be treated well at work."
trouble is, over here in Europe, nobody is paying.
Enlightening as to possibly why their overall UX is worse than the IRS'.
Some of their older platforms had some pretty questionable UX decisions, but with the Switch I feel like they finally nailed it. It's simple and effective.
Even RetroArch copied the Switch UI, which indicates that at least the enthusiast community feels similarly.
This article is about Nintendo of America, which is just a marketing and localisation company. Unless the Switch has a different UX in Japan the UX has nothing to do with Nintendo of America.
Nintendo's UIs are annoyingly slow but they're better than the average Japanese website, which is a lot worse than the IRS. They seem to enjoy online stores where the checkout process is 10 clicks instead of one.
No.
Underlying problem is that Nintendo has a non-viable business model combined with a culture that tolerates things like rigid work hours and low pay. They can't make life better for employees because their business model sucks.
The correct thing is to simply not work for them.
Oh look, an internet expert. Since you’re so confident, what makes the business model not viable, exactly? Is a complicated kind of non-viability that’s somehow plastered over by the company’s wild profitability?
If Nintendo isn't viable then video games in general aren't viable - I know that a lot of modern Nintendo games don't really appeal to the HN crowd but classic IP like Mario & Link are some of the most recognizable properties out there... additionally Pokemon and Animal Crossing have dominated the casual game space.
A union can force better working conditions and an appropriate price increase for their products can make that sustainable - if it's even really needed, tbh Nintendo isn't shy about pricing games pretty high when you take into account all the re-releases of titles they do.
The article explains how Nintendo products kept flopping leading to a two tiered employment system designed to cut costs.
"The Nintendo 3DS was released in 2011 and immediately stalled, burdened by the lack of a compelling launch line-up, the rise of smartphones, and a $249.99 price point. Nintendo was forced to move aggressively, slashing the system's price and rolling out special benefits for existing owners. A year later, Nintendo released the Wii U, which fared even worse."
Yea - generally two-tiered employment systems do that. The reason companies hire skilled labour is because the skill more than makes up for the cost. Modern America is in love with the idea that replaceable contractors are every bit as effective as full time employees. Once upon the time this was more than correct when contractors tended to be (mostly) highly skilled folks that would swoop in for critical problem solving, however, it being seen as a lucrative field and then a way to dodge taxes and benefits has watered it down significantly.
Contractors aren't, by definition, any better or worse than full time employees. But when the going gets rough and the gruel is thin the good contractors will all immediately jump ship because, well, they're contractors - that will reinforce the concentration of lower skilled employees at your company and hurt overall morale.
Lastly, treating your coworkers like dirt will get them to give you the bare minimum to avoid being laid off and, if they're contractors anyways, that might not be any real threat - they can move back into the video game job market with the biggest most legendary game studio ever on their resume.
And yet, the Nintendo Switch is basically a combination of the 3DS and Wii U and it's been doing gangbusters.
Sometimes Nintendo products don't strike a chord. It happens to any company with history in video gaming, including Sony and Microsoft.
My 5 year old and I play Zelda together and both enjoy it. I think their business will do fine.
The past 20 years for Nintendo have been pretty interesting, to say the least. They started with the Gamecube, a console that sold weak numbers and faced stuff competition despite it's library of modern classics. They followed that up with the iPhone of game consoles, the Wii, and moved hundreds of millions of units like it was no big deal. Seeking to capitalize on that same success, they made the Wii U, which seemingly forgot all of the things that made the Wii great in the first place. Then they fixed it with the Switch, identifying the disappointment that people felt with the Wii U and streamlining the product to really dig in to consumer trends. It's a lot of ups and downs, and that's without even touching on their software and handheld history.
It's got me wondering what's up at Nintendo. Their mainstay studios like HAL Laboratories and MercurySteam haven't changed all that much over the years, and their presentation quality and infatuation with design has yet to waver. Overall, I'm starting to think their hardware and management teams are the weakest links: their least successful and least appreciated ventures have been when they wandered outside of their walled garden to make a quick buck (Super Mario Run or Mario Kart Grand Prix, anyone?), second only to their questionable hardware designs over the previous 2 decades. I have nothing but respect for the way Nintendo's developers and engineers deliver a polished product for all kinds of consumers, but I struggle to imagine how they're going to continue to adapt to the market. Especially if they're continuing to merge their handheld and home console markets, I worry they could turn this Switch success into another Wii U moment.
Time will tell, but Nintendo's got quite a tumultuous history with some exceptional highs and dumbfounding lows.
Nintendo has a lot of cash and is more of a toy company than a console company. I tend to think they will be fine.
Their weakest link is almost certainly their marketing team. The Wii U was really cool. Nintendo Land was insanely fun. The asymmetric local multiplayer was cool as shit. But nobody understood this. Most people didn’t know the Wii U was a different console.
Many many years later, my kids still get a ton of mileage out of the wii u. As one kids gets old enough to play, the others return to the games and get more out of the stellar multiplayer aspect. Nintendoland, Mario kart, Mario 3d world, new super Mario bros u, Wii party, Mario party - loads of fun.
I often think this has to do with the demographics of the current game buying population. Nintendo appeals to children, parents and people comfortable enough with their inner child to enjoy fun things.
There are a lot of people who are not like that. For example, there are huge popular mods for kerbal space program that add in military weapons and military vehicles. To some people that is cool as hell, to others its an abomination of the game. I think Nintendo's problem is also this same dichotomy and their popularity ebbs and flows with how the current game buying population leans. Population of gamers into safe and fun games like Mario? Nintendo does well and vice versa.
It's also wild how they flubbed the name so hard with the Wii U, right after they flubbed the name with the 3DS that had the same issue in early days, where people thought it was just another variant of the DS (which already had several variants previously)
Then once the 3DS had some success, they had to confuse everyone once again with the "new 3DS" which I suppose was at least less of an issue since it wasn't really a new console. But it sure as hell makes the used market confusing, when you don't know the difference between a new 3DS unit and a used "new 3DS" unit
Oh man I forgot about the new 3DS. I think they were going for a “New Super Mario Bros” vibe. But that was atrocious.
Their user experience for creating accounts and connecting profiles to consoles and making purchases is royal shite. Makes me want to visit the IRS website and try to log in.
Mario Kart Tour on mobile seems to be doing just fine. It's bringing in enough money that Nintendo is still making new tracks for it.
Strong console sales, weak software sales, especially for third-parties. Lots of Wii consoles sold, but a good number only ever played the bundled Wii Sports disc, and never bought any other title. 3DS and Wii U had the same issue for third-party titles.
You can see this in their offerings. They are consistently 10+ years behind the times in terms of multiplayer and online. That they are still so popular is a credit to how divorced from reality multi national corporate mega giants can be and still succeed. Their games and online offerings, for the most part, frankly suck compared to their competitors. They are alive purely on the strength of the 5% of good games they put out by rehashing the same 3 franchises over and over and over and over.
> That they are still so popular is a credit to how divorced from reality multi national corporate mega giants can be and still succeed.
Well, that and the size of the market itself.
> Their games and online offerings, for the most part, frankly suck compared to their competitors.
Their online offerings, sure, I guess. But their games are good, even on their consoles that don't sell well. Nintendo made a lot of money by doing nothing more difficult than porting really good games on Wii U onto the Switch.
They make money on remakes of decades-old games with minor graphical and quality of life tweaks because the games are good.
Not everything likes all of their games, and that's fine, but many do.
Most of the mario and zelda ports yes.
> They are consistently 10+ years behind the times in terms of multiplayer and online.
Nintendo has never and probably will never try and seriously compete in the multiplayer arena - they've got some casual multiplayer stuff but they're not trying to out compete Call of Duty, Halo or Starcraft.
I do agree that they do milk those main properties for all their worth, but they're pretty careful about releasing bombs - Mario Odyssey was a pretty notable and dramatic fail for them but, again, the fact that their games suck to you doesn't matter. I'm a big fan of EU4 and as such Nintendo doesn't want my business - they cater to young and casual audiences building easy to access for the family games rather than historical simulators or Dark Souls.
Since when is Mario Odyssey a failure? From wikipedia:
In the United States and Europe, it became Nintendo's fastest-selling Super Mario game ever, with 1.1 million copies sold in the US within five days.[120][121] According to the NPD Group, the game was the best-selling video game of October 2017,[122] and was listed by Amazon as the online retailer's highest-selling game of the year.[123]
Yeah, Odyssey was a great success. Great sales. Great consumer and critic reviews.
I suspect it just got overshadowed by Zelda Breath of the Wild, which really stole the show for the Switch launch year.
Edit: Trying to think which Mario game was NOT considered a success? Maybe Mario Sunshine? That goes back to the Gamecube, and looking at it now... that ALSO had good reviews. I don't think there's been a dud in the mainline Mario franchise... ever?
Yup. Zelda BOTW couldn't be better and along with Odyssey was a perfect way to launch the Switch. Nintendo's success isn't a mystery. Great properties and great games.
I feel there was a lot that BOTW could have improved. mostly the puzzles were boring and repetive, the world started to feel empty, they could have made more creatures, and could have had more story elements
> I don't think there's been a dud in the mainline Mario franchise... ever?
People really love to hate on SMB2 (NES).
I was wondering the same thing. Maybe I haven't been paying close enough attention to sales numbers, but I can't really recall ever hearing anyone refer to Odyssey as anything other than a success.
I would actually say they DOMINATE in a specific multi player arena. That is playing with people right next to you.
There is still a lot of desire for games you can play with people at a party, or play with your children and spouse all together on the same screen. Every other videogame maker has abandoned that niche.
>They are consistently 10+ years behind the times in terms of multiplayer and online. That they are still so popular is a credit to how divorced from reality multi national corporate mega giants can be and still succeed
have you considered that you might be the one divorced from reality and the average consumer does not care about this?
I think you only need to look at things like which games make the most money and which games are most viewed on twitch / youtube etc. Undoubtedly there is still a great market for single player and couch co op games. Nintendo is king here because their copyright moat lets them make the same 4 games every 3 years and we all buy them.
I mean... I don't play a lot of online stuff, but the switch games I've played are pretty terrible. Matchmaking for Tetris 99 takes forever (Mario 99 was slow too). Trying to play Splatoon 2 online with a friend works great if one friend was already playing, then the other friend can queue up to be in their group for the next round. But if two people want to start at the same time, good luck. Especially if one or both are younger children and don't have the patience or perserverance to hit the right buttons every time.
I'm pretty sure forming a group and then finding a match was possible 10+ years ago.
Of course, that doesn't mean the average consumer cares. I'm not even sure I care that much (I'd pay for the online service and play more Tetris 99 if matchmaking was faster though... I don't like sitting around waiting to play, so I do other things instead)
in my experience the tetris matchmaking takes like 30 seconds to start a new match. doesnt feel any noticeably slower than the time between COD matches or something on xbox
their first party titles are pretty bad. Splatoon is anti-fun -- I play 99% of the games I play with my wife and the inability for us to queue up and play on the same team pushed us away from Splatoon 2 which we otherwise loved. The co-op mode was fun, but since it is nintendo, not available every day. Just to reiterate -- the only multiplayer mode where you could guarantee you get to play with your friends was PvE and only enabled some days. Most if not all of their games are like this. Look at the pathetic online community for their greatest and most comprehensive super smash game. That is a dropped ball, there isn't really a second way about it.
> Just to reiterate -- the only multiplayer mode where you could guarantee you get to play with your friends was PvE and only enabled some days.
For the online mode of Salmon Run, yes.
It's been a few years since I touched Splatoon but from what I recall, if you go to the arcade, you can set up a local co-op Salmon Run session anytime. It is/was not well-advertised.
splatoon 2 was so, so sad. just really obviously bad decisions that made playing with friends impossible. Maybe to avoid smurfs / stompers? But at the cost of precluding anyone that likes playing with their friends.
This seems like overstated personal opinion. Market data, the consumer and the critic all disagree.
The Switch platform has been a stellar success and isn't stopping any time soon. As a business, Nintendo is thriving.
Nintendo franchises stay pretty fresh relative to other franchises. Is your issue with the concept of franchises in general? Every platform/ecosystem has them.
For Nintendo, the first party platform and franchises have always been the central focus. They remain a hit, decade after decade. So, it's not clear what your beef really is.
"They are alive purely on the strength of the 5% of good games they put out by rehashing the same 3 franchises over and over and over and over."
Completely agree with you here and just want to emphasize that the 5% of the IPs they rehash over and over produce legendary games. Many of these games push the boundaries of gaming in every way possible.
They're taking advantage of the still sizeable population of people who enjoy offline, single-player games. Because they still do that quite well.
I would argue that their hit rate is a lot lower than it has been. Sure, the zelda and mario / mario kart rehashes sell like hotcackes. But their secondary franchises are stagnating hard.
To be real honest, without doing any research, I already assumed working for NOA would be miserable.
To add to this, working at literally any game company is presumably miserable.
We were a Nintendo family when I was a kid (back when that was a meaningful distinction and cross-platform games were very rare) and I continued buying Nintendo systems and games up until the Gamecube era. But at some point I came to a realization and haven't bought anything of theirs since.
Nintendo doesn't take good care of their customers.
There's the confusing half-step hardware upgrades which can potentially leave you with hardware that doesn't technically play the latest games, or has compatibility problems. There's the bizarre hoops you have to jump through to play games with friends online.
But the biggest thing that stops me from buying any new Nintendo platform is that it's going to expire in a way that no modern system should anymore. I have Steam and Microsoft accounts that have records of my purchases from 10 or 15 years ago, and all I have to do is log in and I can download and play them on any new system I get. I don't know how it works on Sony's systems, but I imagine that it's similar. My account is credited with the game, and I can play it when I want to.
When I hear about how people have to keep continually buying classic Nintendo games on their own built-in download service, or lose access to all of their games when they buy a different console unit of the exact same console, or give up on playing with their friends because they can't just tell the service "Account X is my friend," I'm just gobsmacked.
This article makes the case that this attitude of contempt extends to their own employees as well. I think they'd do quite well to eat some humble pie, but I'm not expecting much.
This is using Nintendo to talk about an industry-wide problem. In essence, tech companies use contracted labor to skirt around minimum standards for employment and the law lets them get away with it.
"minimum standards for employment"
What is that? Do you mean "law"?
I'm not entirely sure what you're asking, but tentatively I think the answer is yes. They avoid the legal standards for employment by abusing a 'contractor' legal status.
A contractor is supposed to be an outside expert, not a sub-employee.
And there are very perverse incentives that put massive pressure on an individual contracted employee that is absent when they're an FTE.
A sexually-harassed FTE may be concerned that fighting for their rights is going to black-ball them in their career, but they rarely need be concerned that it'll cost all their colleagues their jobs, because a company is rarely incentivized to cut a whole department if one employee sues but can decide working with a contracted company isn't worth it, and go with one of their competitors to fulfill the contract, if one of the contracted employees makes waves.
A contractor is supposed to be a person operating a business that provides services on a contract basis, a contractors business is no different from any other business that provides professional services. A contractor engages in this work knowing that they are exchanging all of their employment rights for better remuneration. This is how I personally manage to get paid anywhere between $200-$500/hour, and the only person abusing the system here is me taking advantage of companies inability to hire enough permanent staff.
You, as an experienced adult contractor, can say this.
Now imagine being a naive post-teenager being offered to work in "the greatest video game company of all time" but under the sole little condition that you are hired as a contractor.
It works with any big name that you would be personally proud to work for.
And what is even more saddening is that the more the brand is loved (Nintendo is part of the childhood of basically any today engineer), the more they can abuse those tactics. For a lot of people, working for $BIG_COOL_BRAND is already felt as such a gift that they would sign anything without negotiating.
Like everything in life, the older you get, the less you fall in those traps, but that’s not a problem : there is a continuous influx of new people ready to fall for the same tricks.
This applies to any type of employment for a “prestigious” brand, or any other type of “dream job” situation. Any company that has that status can get away with inferior working conditions, because their passionate job applicants find the work rewarding for reasons other than money. This is why the entire video games industry has a reputation for poor working conditions.
Absolutely nothing you’ve said has anything at all to do with contracting.
> Now imagine being a naive post-teenager
Adult. The word you’re looking for is adult.
While on a literal "definition of adult" level, yes, this is correct, let's not pretend that a 22 year old that likely just finished a degree and wants to work for Nintendo making games has a significantly different mentality than a 16 year old that looks forward to earning a degree and then working for Nintendo making games.
That's exactly the word they're not looking for. They don't want to admit that they made poor life choices and paid for them. Once you hit the age of majority you're a functioning adult and you don't get to make excuses anymore. If you make a bad deal then you make a bad deal. The trick is to realize that "bad deals" can be transmuted into good deals with a little spiritual alchemy. In my case I traded roughly a year at Amazon and some Bohemian-style living to make a pile of cash that I'm now pouring into my own business. That option is not for everyone, of course, so in other cases that alchemy simply means trading your time at $SHITCOMPANY for a better job somewhere else. After all: If you have the name of a FAANG on your resume that opens up a lot of doors, right?
TL;DR People really need an education in career development, and clearly they're not getting it.
On whose shoulders does the lack of a good education about labour rights lie on? The individual or the society that values bootstrap-pull-up-ness above all else?
People should be allowed to make mistakes in life, that's how we get innovation and economic growth - experiments are sometimes good and sometimes bad. In a lot of cases these new labour market entrants don't have any comprehension of what working actually means.
Allowing big powerful corporations to beat up young individuals doesn't benefit society, it entrenches power which tends to lead to corruption.
The example you're offering is working for a year at Amazon and tightening your belt a little - a large portion of Americans make just enough money so that they can fall deeper into debt each year while slowly. I, unlike you, worked for a bit at a video game company and also had to tighten my belt... and I managed to save maybe 13k while not drinking or partying or indulging in any luxuries.
Your experience was extremely lucky.
> On whose shoulders does the lack of a good education about labour rights lie on?
Doesn't matter. You only have control over one person: You.
> Allowing big powerful corporations to beat up young individuals doesn't benefit society, it entrenches power which tends to lead to corruption.
No, it really doesn't, but do you have any control over that?
> The example you're offering is working for a year at Amazon and tightening your belt a little - a large portion of Americans make just enough money so that they can fall deeper into debt each year while slowly.
That occurs precisely because "a large portion of Americans" buy McMansions they cannot afford, have families they cannot afford, and otherwise spend well beyond their means. They're trying to have the life their parents and grandparents had and they're trying to have it immediately even though economic conditions do not support that. In short: They made bad decisions.
> I, unlike you, worked for a bit at a video game company and also had to tighten my belt... and I managed to save maybe 13k while not drinking or partying or indulging in any luxuries.
Only? Did you live on your own or with your parents or roommates? Did you have a car or did you use public transportation? And how long is "a bit"?
> Your experience was extremely lucky.
Luck had nothing to do with it. I don't have a wife and kids. I don't own my own home. I sacrificed having that immediately in order to get ahead. Now that things are beginning to work out for me I can explore the possibility of having a family. That wasn't luck... that was planning.
> Doesn't matter. You only have control over one person: You.
That's a good self-reliant attitude, but in practice we are social creatures and we have influence beyond our own bodies. One can consider what one can do alone without interacting with others and what society should do about a deficiency in its constitution (little c) at the same time.
In the middle of the 20th century, two school systems in Virginia shut down their public education for overtly racist reasons. One entire class of high school students just missed public high school. A lot of them pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and got a GED. They deserve everything that their hard work brought them. And they also deserved The reparations the state government eventually paid them as a compromise around the fact that it violated their civil right to a public education because they had the "wrong" skin color.
> That occurs precisely because "a large portion of Americans" buy McMansions they cannot afford...
You may not have heard because the news is not widespread, but this upcoming generation (and the one currently in their twenties) will statistically on average have a worse life than the generation you're thinking of that bought houses with the money they made working. Everything is a McMansion now. Housing prices are insane for the same houses relative to the average American paycheck. There is no amount of bootstrapping and rugged individualism that will make life better off for the average American unless something changes drastically. And those young people have an absolute right to be pissed that the social structures that their parents' generation took advantage of were looted and gutted or allowed to rot by the time they came of age, and that the people with authority who should be solving new problems as they came along have proven utterly inept at dealing with modern challenges.
> That wasn't luck... that was planning.
Well, planning and luck. You didn't get in a car accident and end up stuck with debilitating medical bills when you were working a job that wouldn't offer insurance (And if every job you've worked came with health insurance, statistically that's an extraordinary stroke of luck). You have the luxury of living somewhere where public transportation was possible, either you were born there or at some point you had the means to get there.
And even with all that luck, you have sacrificed things that the previous generation could have assumed were a given by your age. Things you would have had access to if salaries had kept pace with the GDP. A pace that is set by policy that can be changed by law.
So by all means, in the context you find yourself, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and have pride in your accomplishments. You have earned them. But living in complacency that things just are the way they are when they were simply not that way for the previous generation or pretending you have no control over that and representative democracy is a cop-out. It's abdicating your fraction of citizen responsibility to build a better democracy for the next generation.
(... Primary elections are this month, and on average only a quarter of voters show up. If you vote, your vote is proportionally speaking four times as valuable ;) ).
> That's exactly the word they're not looking for. They don't want to admit that they made poor life choices and paid for them.
Why are you making this personal?
> Once you hit the age of majority you're a functioning adult and you don't get to make excuses anymore. If you make a bad deal then you make a bad deal.
That's a very cruel way to look at the situation, when many new adults have zero negotiating experience.
> TL;DR People really need an education in career development, and clearly they're not getting it.
Yes, they do. Not getting that education, as a child, is not a poor life choice! It's not a high schooler's fault to not get a good education there, and it doesn't suddenly become your fault the day you turn 18.
You can expect someone to learn these things after some years in the workforce. Before that it's all the more important for society to keep things in line and prevent abuses.
> Why are you making this personal?
Why are you avoiding responsibility? You don't control the world. You only control yourself. Change the things you can change.
> That's a very cruel way to look at the situation, when many new adults have zero negotiating experience.
Almost no adults have any negotiating experience. That doesn't change anything. You're still responsible for your own actions. You will make mistakes. You will fail. You're still expected to get up and try again.
> Yes, they do. Not getting that education, as a child, is not a poor life choice!
...but refusing to seek it out as an adult is. I didn't have someone to teach me these things. I learned them the hard way like everyone else.
> It's not a high schooler's fault to not get a good education there, and it doesn't suddenly become your fault the day you turn 18.
Actually, yes, that's exactly what it means. As an adult you are responsible for your own condition. No one else owes you anything.
> You can expect someone to learn these things after some years in the workforce. Before that it's all the more important for society to keep things in line and prevent abuses.
...which isn't going to happen. OTOH, individuals can learn how to adapt to the way things are and make things better for themselves. I find it interesting that teaching people how to take advantage of the present system and better themselves is viewed as "making this personal" and somehow a bad thing, whereas complaining and accomplishing nothing is not.
> I find it interesting that teaching people how to take advantage of the present system and better themselves is viewed as "making this personal" and somehow a bad thing, whereas complaining and accomplishing nothing is not.
Yeah I sometimes find stuff I completely imagined interesting too.
The 'making it personal' part was the part I quoted. You took a general comment about contracting relationships and turned it into a claim that pjerem specifically "made poor life choices and paid for them".
It wasn't about anything else you said.
> You will make mistakes. You will fail. You're still expected to get up and try again.
Ok true. Nobody said otherwise here. But are you implying it’s ok for companies to exploit this natural naivety ?
No, but I am saying that you have essentially no control over that, but you do have control over your own person. Focus on the thing you can control rather than wasting your time arguing about the things you can't.
> a person operating a business that provides services on a contract basis
That's obviously not the case with the contractors described in the story, who are blatantly just direct employees in all regards except with less benefits.
That’s how pretty much all of my contracting engagements work.
You are in a radically different industry from game testing. Game testing is taking advantage of loopholes in contract law and the naivety of a relatively young employee base.
What loopholes do you think they taking advantage of specifically? Because the article doesn’t describe any. It’s mostly about how they’re treated like “second class citizens” compared to the permanent staff. Which is exactly what contracting is, and exactly how it works for me. In reality, contractors aren’t citizens at all, and not being allowed to use the nice facilities, or eat the free snacks or whatever is just a part of the role. Whether you’re a games tester or anything else.
Isn’t this the reality inside any large companies in America?
Contractors will always live in a different world than full timers. It sucks, but that’s what it is.
It is what it is but it's so awful it's actually illegal to make contractors work as employees in most of the world. I'd wager it's got to be illegal in at least some American states.
This two-tier system is literally how the U.S. federal government works as well in a great deal of functions.
The distinction between contractors and employees is nationwide.
I've been reading about the "red badge of shame" at Google for at least the past 6 or 7 years. Seems like Nintendo isn't really an outlier in this case.
I’m reminded of the saddening story behind (potentially) SEGA’s greatest failure that essentially killed them in the console business - the development hell that was Sonic X-Treme.
X-Treme artist and developer, Chris Senn and Chris Coffin, became so ill during the development process, living under desks at SEGA Technical Institute and treated more like robots than humans.
Doctors said Coffin would be ‘dead in 6 weeks’ if he continued development, X-Treme was cancelled - and SEGA’s flagship mid 90’s Saturn console never got a mainline exclusive Sonic title.
The hell game developers often go through actually caused me to stray from my initial teenage ambitions of being a game dev. I’m so, so glad I chose mobile instead.
Some of the attitude expressed in this comment section show just how out of touch a lot of you are. These contractors are not contractors by choice. They are not even contractors in the sense you probably think like sending an invoice to Nintendo and having it paid. They work for shitty companies like Aerotek that provide very little benefits AND they can only work 10 out of the 12 months of the year due to laws trying to prevent exactly what Nintendo is doing which is using contractors as discount full time employees. The tax payer is subsidizing Nintendo because these people end up on unemployment for two months every year.
It's this. Think Cognizant, Accenture, CyberCoders, etc. They aren't making $200+ an hour as contractors, they're being paid like $40 an hour without any benefits and are treated like garbage.
These workers are part of retail and callcenter, they are surely under $20.
My callcenter experience can be summed up as "better than fastfood or retail I guess"
$40 and hour is still $40 and hour. Live like a Bohemian, pile up your cash for a year, two years, four years... and then bounce to something better. Learned helplessness and expecting a daddy to come along and fix everything for you is not productive.
It’s not actually $40 an hour in my experience. It’s closer to $25 and even then the amount of stress and responsibility you have is absurd for being a lowly contractor.
Then don't work there, or do as I directed and leverage time there to get better work elsewhere. A company that is determined to treat people as "human resources" will not be deterred just because you complain. It will be deterred only by failure. So let them fail and in the meantime use their failure as a means to get a leg up yourself.
"Then don't work there". Christ, what privilege.
A lot of that going on around here, as per usual
ITT we learn that making intelligent decisions that require sacrifice is somehow "privilege"... but whining about making bad decisions isn't.
The key piece is "require sacrifice."
It is privilege to have something you can sacrifice, and not just be trapped.
...in which case exactly 1% of the population are unprivileged enough to not have family, friends, or choices. This is literally an excuse for people who don't want to even try.
Hello should that number be before we as a society accept it?
1% is staggeringly high. That's one and a half million people. If our system operates on exploiting one and a half million people, we should change that system.
Gee I’m sure my managers at Intel as a green badge would really have appreciated that waiting to fail speech from me when I was getting paid $35/hour (with some benefits, I’ll admit) in 2013 via W-2 contract.
Weird that you think it's learned helplessness when I'm advocating on the behalf of others.
They are contractors because they desperately want to work in the game industry but don't have valuable skills. Everyone knows the pay is bad, the work conditions suck, even the simplest of google searches gives you all that information and more but people keep signing up by the truckload. That's why people here have no sympathy.
> The tax payer is subsidizing Nintendo because these people end up on unemployment for two months every year.
Contract workers are not eligible for unemployment except under a very small number of circumstances and simply not renewing a contract is not one of them.
Well I know people who do exactly what I said so I think you don’t understand the situation as well as you think you do. It has nothing to do with contract renewal it is a forced 2 month break between contracts.
Also, they are not 1099 contractors they work directly under companies such as Aerotek or whoever and get a regular W-2. Those companies then contract them to Nintendo.
I completely agree. Lots of out of touch in this discussion thread. “They are contractors, what do they expect!?”
If anything, this demonstrates that unemployment benefits should be harshly cut.
> Contractors increasingly see themselves as second-class citizens
This made me laugh
My dude, you’re not a citizen at all.
In my experience freelancing, you tend to be treated as a business owning peer than a "citizen" employee.
That's different than the types of contractors that work for body shops like Accenture. Those "contractors" are not treated like business owners or employees, but a lower tier of replaceable cheap and servile labor resources. They also get paid much, much less than your typical contractor. Think like $30 to $40 an hour, obviously with zero benefits, and they aren't afforded the freedoms most freelancing devs enjoy, like the abilities to choose when, where and how their work gets done.
Just because you're a contractor it doesn't mean you don't deserve "even a basic professional respect."
What is your point? Sencond-class citizen seems like a valid analogy for two types of employees.
There's arguably a difference between a contractor employed by Nintendo (receiving a 1099 from the company) and a contractor employed by an outsourcing firm that Nintendo uses (paid by the outsourcing firm). The former seems analogous to "second-class citizens" while the latter seems analogous to "foreign resident"
Perhaps making a reference to the fact that employees (contract or otherwise) are more like subjects than citizens.
A contractor is not an employee.
Yeah, weird...'contractor' as an employment category by definition means that a company doesn't deal with you as a regular employee. What exactly did these people think they signed up for?
Employers make it a point, often, to blur the lines. Contractors, by government definition, get to choose their own hours, their own tools, they must be compensated dynamically for their expenses. When I was a contractor I felt that I was an FTE with shittier benefits; I was told where to be and when to be there, my tools were dictated to me, and if I ever asked about purchasing something to do my job better I was assuredly told, "no". I think, "I feel like a second class citizen" adds up to, "I was duped into FTE with none of the benefits."
The healthiest thing to do, as a contractor, is to draw the line in both directions. Be very familiar with your contract and if an employer asks you to do something outside it, reply with a very clear "I'm sorry but that's not in the scope of my duties. If you need me to take that on we can renegotiate."
It feels shitty if you're of the mindset that you want to solve problems and not play legal games, but Lord knows the employer isn't incentivized to not try and wring every ounce of work out of you they can get for below-market FTE prices.
Not that you're wrong...but (speaking from second-hand experience: my ex was [0] a contractor at FB) this sort of thing is a fabulous way to lose your job. The company will do whatever it has to do to bring the hammer down on any nails that stick out, and they've got enough legal and financial resources to get away with it.
[0] https://medium.com/@techworkersco_79433/who-fired-the-ras-or...
You are 100% correct. Unfortunately, that attitude is needed because it also serves as an early-warning fuse for that relationship; the in-built assumption in my advice is the contractor has the freedom to leave and contract with someone else. If the employer tries to extract work from you without compensation, they are abusing the contractor relationship and giving a clear signal that it may be time to take one's labor elsewhere.
The word "contractor" is overloaded. Many folks, apparently including the Nintendo workers described [1], are actually not contractors, in the 1099 sense, under the law. Instead, they are W-2 employees of Company B, which is hired by Company A. Company B is legally responsible for offering them benefits, but they don't have to be equal to Company A's.
[1] "The specific charge, as first reported by Axios, is levied against both Nintendo of America and recruiting firm Aston Carter, which hires contractors for various administrative and customer support roles at Nintendo." https://www.ign.com/articles/former-nintendo-employee-accuse...
That's not "contractor" being overloaded, that's the definition of contractor not growing when companies invented this scheme. It's the same circumstances a contractor runs into, and often the contract company is running really bare minimum, awful benefits.
In general, "a job at a name people know."
It's not like Google, for example, is looking to hire you if you don't have one of the couple-dozen college names they're into on your résumé. But if you get hired by a contracting company that posts you at Google to do a contracted task, you'll get to put that "Worked at Google" experience on the résumé and get a leg up.
Plus some people (falsely) assume that the environment will be great because the company has a great reputation. At the interface of the contractor level, that varies widely. I had to go to bat at my old office because I randomly showed up on the weekend and found out all the contractors were working in 85-degree heat in an office building; the building turned the A/C off on the weekend to save power, and nobody had thought to ask it be turned on when we moved a whole contracting team in to work weekends.
How do you put on your resume worked for google when you worked for actionforce or outshored?
>worked at Google.
At, not for.
If a contractor is part of the team treat them like they are or don't expect them to be part of your team.
I never understand articles like this. Am I supposed to feel bad for playtesters because they don't have access to a soccer field and D-pad shaped couches?
Most people have jobs without those perks. Does the fact that you do work for a company "in tech" make it worse that you're not showered with benefits? The margins aren't high and the work they are doing can be done by almost anyone.
It's not about being "showered with benefits", it's about the basic workplace culture leaving employees so uncomfortable and paranoid that (as noted in the article) they literally reenact cartoon plots to auto-press a keyboard so they can go the bathroom without being hassled.
I'm just saying the article talks a lot about benefits these people don't have, but almost nobody has such benefits.
If the article only talked about conditions like what you're describing, it would be 1/8th as long and I wouldn't have complained.
Can you explain to me which benefits exactly the article is describing that is over the line? With quotes from the article.
"outdated equipment and software"
"still possible to find bins of old VHS tapes"
"the soccer pitch, which is also off-limits"
"employees apologizing profusely if they left even 15 minutes early."
"being fired if they missed three days of work"
"Contractors are excluded from ... the company holiday party"
"feel unwelcome ... staying too long in Cafe Mario"
"the internal webpage we were encouraged to look at that showed ... benefits (like a sizable Christmas bonus)"
"march with Nintendo of America in the annual Pride parade"
...
Most of what you mentioned aren't benefits? I'm very confused as to what you're trying to accomplish here, considering I explicitly called out benefits.
1/2 are examples of an outdated workplace (and is meant to be an example of how bad the job is), 3 is an example of how different contractors are treated (and is rather silly), 4/5/6/7 are examples of an awful workplace, 8 is a further example of how they are treated as second class employees and 8 is similar to 3.
A lot of people deal with toxic workplaces, yes. That doesn't mean a crab in a pot mentality is a good one to have because it just ends up dragging everyone down to the most toxic workplace. Instead people should work on calling out and improving their workplaces, which was the intent of this article.
Every single thing that a company does to contractors is something they eventually want to do to full time employees. If they could, they would convert everyone to contractor status, force awful methods of monitoring employee activity and more.
The mistake I see my fellow engineers make is assuming they're not disposable because they're full time, or that the axe won't eventually turn on them.
I think you could take the opposite view as well. Yes, if they could treat employees poorly then they would, but they can't so they don't. There is more demand for talent than there is supply of talent. I work at a company that has both contractors and full time employees, and it is very obvious when looking at work product why the contractors are the contractors and the full time employees are the full time employees.
Contractor output is frequently technically shoddy or lazy; their reports are riddled with grammatical mistakes and frequently difficult to understand; and there is no way that they could take point when interfacing with a customer as their English skills simply aren't good enough.
Contractors often work for a business like any other. I've worked with companies where the contractors were better than the employees and vice versa.
But the quality of the contractors is ultimately irrelevant because we're talking about workplace protections and benefits. You SHOULD be blaming your company instead for taking cost saving measures that impact the rest of your organization. If your company is working with contractors that are core to your business then they should be treated the same as your employees. And we should be eliminating the middle area where companies want to treat contractors as lesser employees so they can pay them less for the same work.
What am I supposed to do with this lesson?
The larger concern around contractors, which the article touches on a bit but doesn't really crack open, is that all incentives are structured around the contracted company firing a trouble employee instead of working with them. And by "trouble employee" here, I mean "an employee who has suffered abuse, up to and including actual sexual harassment, from the main company and its staff and could therefore cause legal trouble for the main company."
Protections at the interface of two companies, where the employee is not technically an employee of the main company, are thin on the ground and legally complicated. And whether intentional or not, this has the consequence of making a fertile ground for all manner of quasi-legal employee abuse.
I worked at a company where a contracted employee was sexually harassed by a full-time engineer, and the "support" she got from her boss was clear adavice to keep silent because if the main company felt the situation was too problematic she could cost everyone their job when the main company decided to contract out to another provider. Because that'd be easier for them than even confronting the full-timer responsible.
(... the videogame industry brings its own flavor of sickness to the table above and beyond these general concerns. While my friend was humiliated and depressed as hell about the situation, the reason the threat from her boss even held weight is because they would be there months down the road. A lot of game studios cut their contractors loose when the game is out the door; there's no job security to be had).
The startup I currently work for has (IMO) a reasonable number of benefits
- weekly lunch
- get drunk on the company a handful of times a year
- dogfooding our product for free
- certs + professional development
A company offering substantially less than that I’d consider stingy or too up tight. Not appreciative of the workers. Look at low margin industries like the warehouse.
A company offering more, Id feel good about.
A company offering bean bags, video games, excessive alcohol, I’d definitely feel suspicious about. Who are you trying to buy with these trinkets?
It's all relative
Some people are so disconnected they think our company is stingy because our world class chef only oversees lunch service and dinner meals are only comped after 6....
Tech in general has a crazy entitlement problem when it comes to perks.
I have a hard time taking any company seriously that facilitates the consumption of alcohol during work hours, with the exception of parties/celebrations.
I've worked for plenty of places that facilitate alcohol during work hours. For 99% of people that work there they enjoy a beer after lunch while they knock out some evening work or internal meetings, or just choose not to participate. Some people like to casually drink and while that isn't true of all individuals, depending on your team that might be a big morale boost for people that can drink responsibly in the workplace.
I was mostly referring to parties, though a liquid lunch during a (rare) slow week is not unheard of and can prove quite conducive to meetings.
> The margins aren't high
Nintendo’s margins are almost 30%.
Wow